Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a liquid crystal display having a plurality of openings (slits) in an electrode.
Description of the Related Art
Japanese Patent No. 4107978 (Patent Document 1) discloses a liquid crystal display in which an opening (slit) is provided to each of transparent electrodes placed opposite each other across a liquid crystal layer. With this liquid crystal display, a fringe electric field is generated in two different directions based on the effect of the slits and applied to the liquid crystal layer, whereby a two-domain alignment structure occurs in the liquid crystal layer. Consequently, the viewing angle dependency is improved, and the viewing angle dependency of the overall display area can be reduced. Moreover, JP-A-2009-122271 (Patent Document 2) discloses a liquid crystal display which aims to improve the display uniformity in a liquid crystal display provided with the foregoing slits, by causing a gap between the slits that are adjacent in the longitudinal direction to be smaller than a width (length in the short direction) of the respective slits.
Meanwhile, generally speaking, when manufacturing a liquid crystal display, a method of collectively forming a plurality of liquid crystal displays on one mother glass, and subsequently splitting the mother glass into respective liquid crystal displays is being adopted. Thus, when patterning multiple slits, variation in the etching precision tends to arise due to the in-plane position of the mother glass or differences in the production lots. Due to this kind of variation in the etching precision, there is a drawback in that the slits become joined with each other in their respective longitudinal directions, and a partial disconnection occurs in an electrode. As a solution for dealing with the foregoing drawback, considered may be lowering the etching rate by changing the etching solution or the setting of the treatment temperature. Nevertheless, lowering etching rate is undesirable since the production efficiency of the liquid crystal display will drop when the etching rate is lowered. Meanwhile, if a gap between the slits in the longitudinal direction is enlarged, the disconnection caused by the joining of the slits can be more easily prevented without having to lower the etching rate. However, as described above, in order to maintain the display uniformity of the liquid crystal display, the slit width is required to be enlarged pursuant to the enlargement of the gap between the slits in the longitudinal direction. Nonetheless, since the effective aperture ratio of a display unit of the liquid crystal display will drop as the slit width is enlarged, this measure is undesirable.